Sometimes, you produce a UI that makes perfect sense to you, but when you introduce it to another player, they can’t follow it. That happened to me with Icefall’s UI bar. Originally, my layout placed the player character’s health and mana bars in the bottom left corner, with the player’s current target displayed next to
Hi again. Although I haven’t posted anything for a long time, I have still been (occasionally) developing Icefall. There are three new concepts which I have introduced since my last Icefall post – two enhancements to the visual engine, and one to the game core. Today I’ll talk about one of the visual enhancements –
A quick look at the Xbox 360 Kinect… looks good. Note that it’s much faster response time on the guy in the red sweater compared to the chick in the black and white. At previous demos, the demonstrators have been wearing red too. Apparently, they worked firstly on fine-tuning the system to minimise latency on
People who know me on Facebook may be aware that I recently took a break from Icefall to focus on networking code. I plan for networking to form an important part of Icefall’s gameplay: the game itself is not realtime multiplayer, however I plan for an ‘Auction House’, scoreboards/leaderboards/server-firsts, player-to-player mail, and other online community-type
As a general rule, I like to write all of the code used by my games/programs myself. Not because I think I am the best programmer in the world, but because – for me – one of the main reasons I program is to learn more about how software functions on the very lowest levels,
Long time, no update. My holiday from my real job is almost at an end, but the good news is that I have spent a lot of time with Icefall and it’s actually starting to come together! I had developed a lot of separate pieces of game infrastructure (random map generation, character creation, character death…
Sorry, no posts for a while! I’m on holiday for Christmas, although I will be spending some time working on finishing up Icefall, I probably won’t be posting that much. See you in the new year!
This is the second entry in my set of “10 Game Development Golden Rules”. Hopefully, this one is less contentious than the first! The rule is: Provide gamma and volume controls, and separate music from sound. Pretty simple. But essential! The good news is, the AAA titles pretty much universally support this now. And it’s
OK, this trick is probably universally known, but I’ve only just discovered it (by the classic programmer method of reinventing it), so on the chance there are others who are unfamiliar with this technique, it’s worth describing. Any sufficiently complex game is going to have “assets”: data external to the main program that the game
One of the hardest bits about creating Icefall was getting the User Interface (UI) just right. Icefall’s chief inspirations are “old-school” role-playing games like Angband (aka Roguelikes: Nethack, Moria, Omega, ADOM all fall into this category). But these old-school games all rely on essentially a text-mode interface with a myriad of hotkeys. I want to